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Monday, April 15, 2013
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
First storm towers of 2013!
I love watching storm towers go up. I caught this one on my way down to Lubbock today (this one was near Tulia) and thought it was cool when the top of the storm hit what I think was the cap. It looks like snow blowing off a mountain top.
(C) Steve Douglass photography
Monday, March 11, 2013
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Posible severe weather tomorrow Amarillo & vicinity
SPC AC 070543 DAY 2 CONVECTIVE OUTLOOK NWS STORM PREDICTION CENTER NORMAN OK 1143 PM CST WED MAR 06 2013 VALID 081200Z - 091200Z ...THERE IS A SLGT RISK OF SVR TSTMS ACROSS THE SOUTHERN HIGH PLAINS... ...SOUTHERN/CENTRAL HIGH PLAINS... LATEST SHORT RANGE MODEL GUIDANCE IS IN GENERAL AGREEMENT REGARDING THE EJECTION OF LEAD SPEED MAX ACROSS NRN MEXICO TOWARD THE TX SOUTH PLAINS BY 09/00Z. THIS FEATURE IS EXPECTED TO SHARPEN THE DRYLINE WHICH WILL EXTEND FROM A LEE CYCLONE OVER SERN CO...SWD ALONG THE TX/NM BORDER INTO THE BIG BEND REGION. LLJ WILL RESPOND TO THE APPROACHING MID LEVEL SPEED MAX AND FAVORABLE BOUNDARY LAYER TRAJECTORIES ARE EXPECTED TO ALLOW MODIFIED LOW LEVEL MOISTURE TO ADVANCE NWD ACROSS THE WRN GULF BASIN INTO THE TX SOUTH PLAINS BY PEAK HEATING. MODELS REMAIN CONSISTENT REGARDING THE LIKELIHOOD FOR LOW 50S SFC DEW POINTS TO RETURN ACROSS THE ERN TX PANHANDLE WHILE 45-50F DEW POINTS COULD BE IN PLACE NEAR THE DRYLINE BY 21Z. IT APPEARS THE STRONGEST BOUNDARY LAYER HEATING WILL OCCUR ACROSS FAR WEST TX INTO ERN NM AND FORECAST CONVECTIVE TEMPERATURES ARE AROUND 65-70F. 23Z SOUNDING FOR DHT EXHIBITS A STRONG VEERING WIND PROFILE WITH HEIGHT AND MUCAPE ON THE ORDER OF 1000 J/KG WITH VERY WEAK INHIBITION. ALTHOUGH PW VALUES ARE SOMEWHAT LOW ACROSS THIS REGION IT APPEARS ISOLATED TSTMS...POSSIBLY SUPERCELLS...WILL EVOLVE BY EARLY EVENING FROM SERN CO...ARCING SSEWD INTO THE TX SOUTH PLAINS. LARGE HAIL IS THE MOST LIKELY SEVERE THREAT...ALTHOUGH CLOUD BASES MAY BE NO HIGHER THAN 1KM DUE TO RELATIVE LOW TEMPERATURE/DEW POINT SPREADS. FOR THIS REASON CAN NOT RULE OUT A FEW TORNADOES. WITH LLJ EXPECTED TO REMAIN STRONG THROUGH THE NIGHT IT WOULD SEEM LIKELY THAT A LOOSELY ORGANIZED LINE OF CONVECTION MAY PROPAGATE INTO WRN OK AND ACROSS WRN/CNTRL KS DURING THE OVERNIGHT HOURS. THIS ACTIVITY WILL BE INCREASINGLY ELEVATED WITH TIME AND SEVERE THREAT SHOULD WANE WITH LOSS OF DAYTIME HEATING.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Monday, December 24, 2012
You can track Santa's flight HERE!
Merry Christmas to all!
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
Dust Bowl gets great review!
By Ned Martel, Published: November 16
This past April, there was no Pulitzer for fiction. Judges and prize administrators struggled to find the right work for right now, and then they gave up. One aftermath assessment: Novels have gotten twee.
In televised nonfiction, on the other hand, Ken Burns has no problem with the big picture. His documentaries for PBS are never not epic. He knows how to make chapters of America’s past seem urgent, whether he’s obsessing over a sport (baseball) or a musical genre (jazz). He’s unafraid of going wider, too, having assembled sagas on World War II and, most famously, the Civil War.
Like good novelists, Burns finds quiet awakenings amid everyday travails, no matter the time period. There’s no real problem with doing this, except the PBS impresario tends to exhaust interest in an epoch as if he’s conducting an honors seminar in the history department. Halfway through, while we’re all furrowing in airless archives, a question often arises: Can this be taken pass-fail?
With “The Dust Bowl,” Burns keeps himself to four concise hours and ably sifts the story out of the dirt. As the filmmaker chronicles farmers in the southern Plains during the Depression years, he looks more carefully at fewer people and distills deeper meaning.
Over 10 years, farmers tore up grasslands to plant more and more wheat, which soon was worth less and less. Next, winds blew away good soil and then more winds brought bad soil to the surface. In towns called Follett and Enid, the filmmaker has found important things to discuss about ecosystems and economies and how they collapse.
More important, Burns also presents novel-worthy characters against an apocalyptic backdrop.
One Job-like figure in the desertified Oklahoma Panhandle is a farm wife who describes endless chores in her elegant magazine dispatches.
Caroline Henderson, a homesteader with a Mount Holyoke degree, is perhaps Burns’s most apt protagonist. She sounds like Laura Ingalls Wilder with an adult awareness; imagine her as the first mommy blogger.
The land changes under Henderson’s feet. Amber waves become arid dunes. Morning in America leads to darkness by noon. She keeps somber vigil as Manifest Destiny comes to a screeching halt.
Not every viewer will be in the mood for a glimpse of the moment when thousands of poor Americans confronted what looked like end times. It’s unsettling, in the season of the “fiscal cliff,” to delve into four hours recounting some previous battered economy, when recovery stretched from wait-till-next-year to wait-till-next-decade.
Somehow, Burns takes care of viewer and character alike. For sure, the pain of infanticidal winds addles the brains of both farm marms and PBS viewers. Hack coughs lead to “dust pneumonia,” which claimed one family’s youngest girl and eldest matriarch in the same week. On the day of their double funeral, a massive storm engulfed mourners, compounding the pain.
That Palm Sunday devastation, in 1935, blew Plains dust all the way to Franklin Roosevelt’s desktop in the Oval Office, and the viewer can practically feel some film of inescapable particles settling, even after the documentary’s gusts have waned. As narrator Peter Coyote pulls back to a wider world, the discussion takes a needed break, turning to Washington players such as Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes, New Deal Cabinet members who debated whether to plow anew or abandon for good, respectively.
As ever, the screen scans historic images — strong, clear, artful ones. Photographer Dorothea Lange trains her lens on wind-whipped faces. Burns knows by now how to pull emotion out of first-person documents and underscores the testimony with piano chords and violin whines. Woody Guthrie finds his voice. And one of many older survivors recalls her mama’s hymn that hoped for “higher ground.”
Obviously, there are American themes of endurance and pluck, but also hype and hubris. In on-camera testimonies, unsparing eco-historians such as Timothy Egan make sense of the sadness, with ample narrative skill. A viewer will understand arcana about soil conservation and grassland water retention, plus how the government came to pay farmers not to farm, a policy that endures.
Wheat prices soar and sink, and fields of dreams become nightmare landscapes. When survivors finally overcome starvation and disease, many pack up and head to California. There, real-life Tom Joads look as hearty and humble as Henry Ford but get mocked as unwashed and defeated Okies.
“The Dust Bowl” is worthwhile not merely as it documents past perseverance but also as it informs future struggles. Leave it to Burns, our mop-topped maestro of American fact, to find the heroine, Caroline Henderson, who can speak for herself and also bring it all home: “Behind the characteristic American nonchalance, one detects a growing anxiety, especially about the coming winter.”
The Dust Bowl
(two hours each night) Sunday and Monday
at 8 p.m. on PBSa
One Job-like figure in the desertified Oklahoma Panhandle is a farm wife who describes endless chores in her elegant magazine dispatches.
Caroline Henderson, a homesteader with a Mount Holyoke degree, is perhaps Burns’s most apt protagonist. She sounds like Laura Ingalls Wilder with an adult awareness; imagine her as the first mommy blogger.
The land changes under Henderson’s feet. Amber waves become arid dunes. Morning in America leads to darkness by noon. She keeps somber vigil as Manifest Destiny comes to a screeching halt.
Not every viewer will be in the mood for a glimpse of the moment when thousands of poor Americans confronted what looked like end times. It’s unsettling, in the season of the “fiscal cliff,” to delve into four hours recounting some previous battered economy, when recovery stretched from wait-till-next-year to wait-till-next-decade.
Somehow, Burns takes care of viewer and character alike. For sure, the pain of infanticidal winds addles the brains of both farm marms and PBS viewers. Hack coughs lead to “dust pneumonia,” which claimed one family’s youngest girl and eldest matriarch in the same week. On the day of their double funeral, a massive storm engulfed mourners, compounding the pain.
That Palm Sunday devastation, in 1935, blew Plains dust all the way to Franklin Roosevelt’s desktop in the Oval Office, and the viewer can practically feel some film of inescapable particles settling, even after the documentary’s gusts have waned. As narrator Peter Coyote pulls back to a wider world, the discussion takes a needed break, turning to Washington players such as Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes, New Deal Cabinet members who debated whether to plow anew or abandon for good, respectively.
As ever, the screen scans historic images — strong, clear, artful ones. Photographer Dorothea Lange trains her lens on wind-whipped faces. Burns knows by now how to pull emotion out of first-person documents and underscores the testimony with piano chords and violin whines. Woody Guthrie finds his voice. And one of many older survivors recalls her mama’s hymn that hoped for “higher ground.”
Obviously, there are American themes of endurance and pluck, but also hype and hubris. In on-camera testimonies, unsparing eco-historians such as Timothy Egan make sense of the sadness, with ample narrative skill. A viewer will understand arcana about soil conservation and grassland water retention, plus how the government came to pay farmers not to farm, a policy that endures.
Wheat prices soar and sink, and fields of dreams become nightmare landscapes. When survivors finally overcome starvation and disease, many pack up and head to California. There, real-life Tom Joads look as hearty and humble as Henry Ford but get mocked as unwashed and defeated Okies.
“The Dust Bowl” is worthwhile not merely as it documents past perseverance but also as it informs future struggles. Leave it to Burns, our mop-topped maestro of American fact, to find the heroine, Caroline Henderson, who can speak for herself and also bring it all home: “Behind the characteristic American nonchalance, one detects a growing anxiety, especially about the coming winter.”
The Dust Bowl
(two hours each night) Sunday and Monday
at 8 p.m. on PBSa
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Thursday, October 18, 2012
In October - sometimes the wind doesn't blow....
- and then the balloons go up.
click to enlarge
(C) Steve Douglass
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Storms bring welcome rain - and a little damage to Amarillo area
About 7 p.m., the weather service recorded 0.39 of an inch of rain at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport, 0.47 of an inch northwest of Canyon, 0.09 of an inch six miles northwest of Fritch, 0.26 of an inch southeast of Pampa, 0.06 of an inch in Hereford and 0.44 of an inch in Bootleg, Goehring said. Residents reported wind damage at Southeast Park Complex at Southeast 46th Avenue and South Osage Street with at least one utility pole snapped and a tree uprooted, but no injuries were reported, Goehring said.
Xcel Energy spokesman Wes Reeves reported 800 houses lost power in the Borger and Fritch areas Wednesday evening, but crews restored power to those houses in about an hour. The weather service warned of high winds, hail and flooding Wednesday afternoon as severe thunderstorms hovered above Potter and Randall counties, meteorologist Andrew Moulton said. “We’ve gotten reports of what we believe to be at least quarter-sized hail near (the Tradewinds area),” Moulton said. “We’ve measured over 60 mph winds in multiple locations, especially east of the city.” Residents also reported flash flooding near Westgate Mall, he said.
READ MORE AT AMARILLO.COM
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Wall cloud capture from last night's storm in Amarillo
Photo by Steve Douglass
Link to VIDEO here!
Saturday, July 28, 2012
July storm at sunset
A dying storm cradles the setting West Texas Sun one more time before it slips behind the far horizon.
Click to enlarge
Photo (C) Steve Douglass
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Thursday, June 14, 2012
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